Out of the hundreds of thousands of people that apply for consulting jobs each year, only 1 – 2% receive offers from top consulting firms, such as McKinsey, BCG, and Bain.

Getting an interview is the first step towards landing a top-tier consulting job offer.

Your resume is the single most important component that determines whether or not you will receive an interview.

Summarizing and highlighting all of your accomplishments, awards, and skills into a one-page resume is no easy task. Ensure you spend sufficient time carefully crafting your resume to maximize the likelihood you’ll be invited for an interview.

Recruiters and resume reviewers look for four main qualities when reviewing a resume:

Intelligence: Resume reviewers want to see high GPAs, test scores, and academic accolades. These demonstrate that you are smart and competent.

High Pedigree: Resume reviewers want to see that you’ve attended prestigious universities and held prestigious jobs at brand name companies. Consulting firms value prestigious pedigrees because it makes selling projects easier.

Track Record of Success: Resume reviewers want to see successful completion of projects, job raises, and job promotions. These demonstrate that you will find success in whatever you do.

Relevant Skills: Resume reviewers want to see that you have the skills to be successful as a consultant. These include both hard skills, such as analyzing data and solving problems, and soft skills, such as leading teams and managing direct reports.

Therefore, when crafting your resume, make sure highlight these four qualities and make it easy for the resume reviewer to identify.

In this guide, I’ll walk you through exactly how to craft an exceptional resume to highlight these qualities and stand out among your peers.

Keep the structure of your resume clean and simple. Divide your resume into three sections:

Experience

Education

Additional Information

If you are applying as an undergraduate student or have little to no work experience, you will also need a fourth section:

Extracurricular Activities

This section will go after Experience and come before Education and Additional Information.

Your resume needs to be one page. No exceptions. If your resume is longer than one page, make your content more concise.

The margins of your resume should be 0.5 inches on the left, right, top, and bottom. This is the optimal margin size to give yourself more space for content, without making the page seem crowded or too busy.

The font size should be Times New Roman. It is one of the most commonly used fonts and is highly conservative and safe to use. You will have no viewer compatibility issues with this font.

For the body of your resume, use a font size of 10.

For the title of your sections, use font size of 11 and all capital letters.

These are the optimal font sizes to give yourself more space for content, without making your resume difficult to read.

The reason for this is that consulting firms value work experience the most. Therefore, you want to show it first.

The order of work experience should go from most recent at the top to oldest at the bottom.

When allocating resume space to each job or role, you should proportion them roughly by how long you had that job or role.

Example: Let’s say that you have had two jobs so far. You worked at your first job for one year and your second job for three years. Therefore, your first job should get one-fourth of the total space in the Experience section and your second job should get three-fourths of the total space.

The exception to this is if you’ve worked at a prestigious or well-known company, such as Goldman Sachs or Google. Prestige and brand names are heavily valued in consulting, so you’ll want to allocate more bullets to these work experiences.

If you have only had one job, but worked there for a long period of time, it may be helpful to separate your bullets into different projects. This will make it easier for the resume reviewer to digest.

Here is an example of how you might separate your bullets into different projects:

Each job that you list should have a minimum of two bullets, the minimum space needed to show depth of accomplishments and achievements.

List the most impressive bullets under each work experience first. Often times, resume reviewers will only read the first couple of bullets.

Every single bullet should start with a verb and be in the past tense to show that you have completed or achieved the accomplishment.

Ideally, every bullet on your resume will start with a different verb to show a variety of different accomplishments.

You can find a list of hundreds of different verbs that you can use here.

Every single bullet should also have some kind of number or metric in them.

Consultants think in terms of numbers, so the more you can quantify your resume bullets, the more impressive and credible they will be.

Don’t just explain what you did and how you did it. Explain what impact your work had and what effect it had on the organization. What was the magnitude of the impact? How many people were affected?

If you improved something at work, how much did it get better? How much additional revenues did you help generate? How much costs did you help save? How does your performance compare to bench marks?

The Additional Information section will also be short and concise to give yourself more space for your work experience.

Organize this section into categories such as: Skills, Certifications, Languages, Volunteer, or Interests.

You will not have space for all of these categories, so pick the categories where you have the most to showcase.

Skills: List technical skills that may be relevant to consulting. These include analytical skills using software such as Tableau, Alteryx, SQL, or R. Do not list something basic, such as Excel or PowerPoint. Everyone knows how to use these.

Certifications: List any certifications or designations that you have, such as CFA or CPA.

Languages: List the languages you speak and indicate your fluency level: basic, proficient, professional, or fluent. Order the languages from most proficient to least.

Volunteer: Highlight volunteer work or non-profit board positions you have made. Make sure to describe and quantify impact of your work.

Interests: Highlight interesting personal accomplishments or hobbies. Ideally, these would be interests that are great conversation starters

Make sure to include Interests in your resume. This is likely the only part of the resume that is interesting to reviewers.

If you’ve won multiple ice cream-making competitions or have a planet or star named after you, include these fun facts.

Avoid listing generic interests such as photography or cooking, which are not memorable.